The main goal of this blog is to think about the darkest time of our history until now: the Holocaust, the Nazi cruelty against the Humanity. //
El principal objetivo de este blog es hacer reflexionar sobre la época más oscura de nuestra historia hasta ahora: el Holocausto, la barbarie Nazi, enemiga de la Humanidad.

lunes, 26 de mayo de 2014

He told American authorities in 1949 he had performed no military service

Court of Justice said his 'service' made him 'holder of a German office'

It is alleged he lied about his wartime service to get into the U.S.

Germany's highest criminal court has the right to prosecute a 95-year-old man accused of being a notorious Nazi commander who 'burnt villages filled with women and children.'

It is alleged that Michael Karkoc was an officer in the SS-led Ukranian Self Defence League and later the SS Galician Division.

According to records, he told American authorities in 1949 he had performed no military service during the Second World War and has been living in a quiet Minnesota town. However, an investigation last year revealed the retired carpenter is alleged to have been a

former commander in a Nazi SS-led unit.

Today the Federal Court of Justice ruled that the 95-year-old's alleged service made him the 'holder of a German office.' This gives Germany the legal right to prosecute him even though he is not German, his alleged crimes were against non-Germans and they were not committed on German soil.

Someone in that role 'served the purposes of the Nazi state's world view,' the court said. Karkoc's son, Andriy Karkos, did not respond to an email by the Associated Press seeking comment and hung up on a reporter who reached him via his mobile phone. A home number for Michael Karkoc was no longer working today.

The court's decision represents 'a big step forward' in the case against Karkoc, said Thomas Will, deputy director of the special federal prosecutors' office that investigates Nazi crimes. He initially handled the case in Germany. Will referred the case to the court late last year after concluding in his own investigation that enough evidence existed to pursue murder charges against Karkoc, who has denied the allegations against him.

Will's office has no powers to file charges itself and the federal court in its ruling referred the case to Munich prosecutors. They will examine the evidence again to determine whether to charge Karkoc and seek his extradition from the United States. The German investigation began after the Associated Press published a story last year establishing that Karkoc commanded a unit accused of burning villages filled with women and children, then lied to American immigration officials to get into the United States a few years after the Second World War.

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This photo of Michael Karkoc was part of his application for German citizenship filed with the Nazi SS-run immigration office on Feb. 14, 1940

A second story uncovered evidence that Karkoc himself ordered his men in 1944 to attack a Polish village in which dozens of civilians were killed, contradicting statements from his family that he was never at the scene.

Polish prosecutors also now are investigating.

The U.S. Department of Justice has declined to confirm whether it also is investigating Karkoc, citing its policy of not confirming or denying individual investigations. Karkoc applied for German citizenship on February 14, 1940, according to Nazi documents signed by Karkoc and located by the AP in February in the U.S. National Archives in College Park, Maryland, but he was rejected because of his lack of German language skills.

The SS-administered immigration office instead said it would provide Karkoc - who was 20 at the time and whose date of birth and hometown match those on the documents - passport-like papers identifying him as an ethnic German. Last year Mr Karkoc said he 'can't explain' his wartime service despite denying the allegations.

Following the war, Karkoc ended up in a camp for displaced people in Neu Ulm, Germany, according to documents obtained from the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany. The documents indicate that his wife died in 1948, a year before he and their two young boys - born in 1945 and 1946 - emigrated to the U.S. After he arrived in Minneapolis, he remarried and had four more children, the last born in 1966. A longtime member of the Ukrainian National Association, Karkoc has been closely involved in community affairs over the past decades and was identified in a 2002 article in a Ukrainian-American publication as a 'longtime UNA activist.'

The Galician Division and a Ukrainian nationalist organization Karkoc served in were both on a secret American government blacklist of organizations whose members were forbidden from entering the United States at the time. Though records do not show that Karkoc had a direct hand in war crimes, statements from men in his unit and other documentation confirm the Ukrainian company he commanded massacred civilians, and suggest that Karkoc was at the scene of these atrocities as the company leader.

Nazi SS files say he and his unit were also involved in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in which the Nazis brutally suppressed a Polish rebellion against German occupation.The U.S. Department of Justice has used lies about wartime service made in immigration papers to deport dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals. In Germany, Nazis with 'command responsibility' can be charged with war crimes even if their direct involvement in atrocities cannot be proven.

Former German army officer Josef Scheungraber - a lieutenant like Karkoc - was convicted in Germany in 2009 on charges of murder based on circumstantial evidence that put him on the scene of a Nazi wartime massacre in Italy as the ranking officer.

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This is the oath of allegiance on Michael Karkoc's petition for naturalization, signed May 6, 1959

Karkoc now lives in a modest house in northeast Minneapolis in an area with a significant Ukrainian population. In a background check by U.S. officials on April 14, 1949, Karkoc said he had never performed any military service, telling investigators that he 'worked for father until 1944. Worked in labor camp from 1944 until 1945.' Karkoc, an ethnic Ukrainian, was born in the city of Lutsk in 1919, according to details he provided American officials.

At the time, the area was being fought over by Ukraine, Poland and others; it ended up part of Poland until World War II. Several wartime Nazi documents note the same birth date, but say he was born in Horodok, a town in the same region.

Reaching the age of 105 would be enough to mark most people out as remarkable. For Sir Nicholas Winton, it is the least of his achievements.

The British hero who saved 669 Jewish children from the Holocaust celebrated his birthday with the news that he is to receive the Czech Republic’s highest honour.

Sir Nicholas will be awarded the Order of the White Lion, the country’s most revered state distinction, for giving Czech children “the greatest possible gift: the chance to live and to be free”.

The Czech president, Milos Zeman, wrote to Sir Nicholas: “Your life is an example of humanity, selflessness, personal courage and modesty.”

In 1939, Sir Nicholas masterminded the transportation of children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to Britain, saving them from the concentration camps.

He rarely spoke of his achievements in the decades that followed, believing his actions to be unremarkable.

He came to public attention only in 1988, when he was reunited with some of those who call themselves “Nicky’s Children” on an emotional episode of the BBC programme That’s Life!

Sir Nicholas has outlived many of those he saved, and looked positively sprightly at the Czech Embassy on Monday night as he was presented with a cake bearing 105 candles.

"As far as I’m concerned, it’s only anno domini that I’m fighting. I’m not ill, I’m just old and doddery – more doddery than old, actually,” he said. Sir Nicholas insisted on standing to deliver his speech.

He attributes his longevity to good genes and staying active. When undergoing a hip replacement at the age of 103, doctors asked him if he would want to be resuscitated in the event that his heart stopped on the operating table. He was incredulous.

“Resuscitate me, of course! I want to live!” he said.

His daughter, Barbara Winton, recalled: “Last year when I half-heartedly suggested that perhaps having a party every year was a bit too much, his reply was that, as he didn’t know when the last one would be, he intended to keep having them.”

Sir Nicholas was a 29-year-old stockbroker about to set off on a skiing holiday in December 1938 when a friend urged him to change his plans and visit Prague. A politically-minded young man, he agreed to go in order to witness what was happening in the country.

The Nazis had invaded the Sudetenland two months earlier and the situation in Prague was becoming increasingly dangerous for Jews.

While agencies were organising the mass evacuation of children from Austria and Germany, there was no such provision in Czechoslovakia.

Sir Nicholas began meeting parents who were desperate for their children to be taken to a place of safety, and began compiling a list of names.

The first train left Prague on March 14, the day before German troops marched into Czechoslovakia. Two fellow volunteers, Trevor Chadwick and Doreen Warriner, organised the Prague end of the operation.

Sir Nicholas returned to Britain and masterminded the rescue mission, finding adoptive homes for the children, pleading for funds and navigating the complex bureaucracy – ensuring each child had the £50 guarantee (£2,500 in today’s money) to pay for their eventual return, and securing exit and entry permits.

On some occasions, he forged Home Office documents which had been too slow to arrive, and without which the children would not have been allowed to leave Czechoslovakia.

Name tags around their necks, the bewildered children arrived at Liverpool Street Station where Sir Nicholas and his mother would greet them. Some had relatives in the UK, but most went to live with strangers.

Eight trains reached London. The ninth did not. It had been set to leave on September 1, carrying 250 children – the largest number yet. But that day Germany invaded Poland, and all borders were closed.

Those who arrived at the station were turned away by German soldiers. It is thought that nearly all the children due to leave that day ended up in the concentration camps. Some were siblings of children who had made it out on earlier trains.

An estimated 6,000 people across the world are descendants of ‘Nicky’s Children’.

Guests at the birthday celebration included Lord Dubs, the Labour peer who was six when his mother put him on one of the Kindertransport trains. He was also one of the lucky ones – his parents both survived the war, although other family members perished in Auschwitz.

“Most of the children never saw their parents again so I was exceptional. Don’t put me down as typical,” Lord Dubs said.

“I can still see Prague station – the children, the parents, the soldiers with swastikas. We set off and when the next evening we got to Holland, all the older ones cheered because we were out of reach of the Nazis. I didn’t fully understand.

“It wasn’t until many years later that I understood what had happened and discovered all about Nicholas. When you meet somebody who almost certainly saved your life, it’s very emotional. I didn’t quite know how to handle it.

"I owe my life to him.”

Others rescued by the Czech Kindertransport include Karel Reisz, director of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and Joe Schlesinger, the Canadian television journalist.

Sir Nicholas has always maintained that anyone in his position would have done the same. He dislikes being termed ‘The British Schindler’, pointing out that those who ran the mission from the Prague end took far greater risks with their own safety.

His achievements would have gone unheralded were it not for a scrapbook which he had kept. It contained pictures, documents, letters and photos from the mission, and a list of the children saved.

A family friend passed the scrapbook to a newspaper in 1988 and the story was taken up by That’s Life!, the consumer programme hosted by Esther Rantzen.

Sir Nicholas, then 78, was invited on to the show and, in a moving sequence, found himself seated in an audience made up of those who owed their lives to him.

His involvement with the victims of the Nazis did not end with the Kindertransport.

In 1947, he began work for the International Refugee Organisation, part of the United Nations. His role was to supervise the disposal of items looted by the Nazis and recovered by the Allies.

Amongst the jewellery, furs, china and artworks were horrific reminders of the fate that had befallen so many Jews: crates of false teeth and reading glasses; gold fillings removed from corpses in the gas chambers.

Sir Nicholas’s job involved photographing and sorting these items into those that could be sold at auction – with the money going to help people displaced by the war - and those which were deemed financially worthless.

The latter were disposed of at sea, in a ceremony overseen by Sir Nicholas. He was keenly aware that each “worthless” item was a part of someone’s history, but had no way of tracing ownership.

His last undertaking was to see the gold jewellery melted down into bars, which he brought to London.

A matter-of-fact telegram sent by Sir Nicholas to his boss in February 1948 notes the solemn nature of the task.

Sir Nicholas has said of the disposal: “I think not only of all those innocent lives, senselessly and horrifically cut off, most of them in their prime, but of the depraved minds obsessed with the material gains to be obtained from pitiable items so small and so personal as gold fillings.”

He devoted his later years to working for charity, including the Abbeyfield organisation which provides care for the elderly. Some years ago a chance conversation uncovered the fact that one of his fellow trustees was the son of a child Sir Nicholas had saved.

His extraordinary life has been chronicled in a biography, written by his daughter, Barbara. If It’s Not Impossible… The Life of Nicholas Winton takes its title from his motto: “If something is not impossible, then there must be a way to do it.”

She said of her father: “What he did in 1939 wasn’t out-of-character. It was typical of the kind of impulses he has when he sees a situation and thinks it should be rectified.”

In the book, Barbara writes: “My father’s wish for his biography, having agreed to me writing it, is that it should not promote hero worship or the urge for a continual revisiting of history, but if anything, that it might inspire people to recognise that they too can act ethically in the world and make a positive difference to the lives of others in whatever area they feel strongly about, whether it be international crises or nearer to home, in their own community.

“If reading his story about the rescue of the children causes people to think, ‘What a hero. I could never do anything like that. It’s much too difficult and anyway, heroes like that were on needed in remote history when we were at war. Now let me get on with my life,’ he is not that interested.

“But if reading it inspires people to think, ‘Well, things are not right in the world now. I can make a difference in my own way and I am going to do it,’ then he will be a happy man.”

Sir Nicholas’s parents were Jewish but not religious, and had him baptised as a Christian as a way of integrating into British life. He now describes himself as agnostic.

Asked what message he would like the biography to carry, Sir Nicholas told his daughter: “I came to believe through my life that what is important is that we live by the common ethics of all religions – kindness, decency, love, respect and honour for others – and not worry about the aspects within religion that divide us.”